marketers will turn their focus towards data quality and hold their data partners and providers to higher standards and increased transparency to ensure fresh, first-party (opted-in) data that drives meaningful consumer engagement and better business results.

Our 2017 LSA prediction concerning opt-in turned out to be overly optimistic, and, as we argue in our previous blog post, the major platforms seem reticent to create real-world opt-in capabilities. However, we’ve long argued that individuals will gladly opt-in and share relevant data in exchange for something of real value to them, and would be very pleased to see a surge in such opt-in opportunities in 2018.

Of course, data quality isn’t only about the user: what about the location itself? Reveal Mobile‘s Brian Handly argues:

This doesn’t just mean accuracy of the location data, but also the accuracy of the points of interest that location data is matched against.

Indeed, we too think this will become a key focus in 2018, as we ourselves predicted (on page 64) that retailers will begin to model their physical operations after their established e-commerce practices, by associating each physical point of interest with its online equivalent: the corresponding product/category webpage. In other words, physical browsing behaviour will be measured and analysed exactly as online browsing behaviour, using the latter’s established set of tools.

And how will the distribution of such high-quality data take place in 2018? Thinknear‘s Brett Kohn argues:

The emergence of data marketplaces, improved transparency, and the desire of app publishers to monetize through data rather than ads is driving a wave of data streams into the market.

The emergence and acceptance of data marketplaces will be critical for the widespread adoption of real-time location capabilities. And standards for both first-party data and semantic location data (points of interest) will be essential for such marketplaces to extend seamlessly to applications beyond advertising and retail, as Ubimo‘s Gilad Amitai predicts:

We will also see an acceleration in the usage of real time location intelligence technology and data outside of MarTech in areas such as real-estate, city planning and social studies.

That’s consistent with our observations: real-estate and the smart workplace are driving our business this year while there’s enormous potential for smart cities on the horizon.

The World Wide Web turns 30 years old today, March 12th 2019, and its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has asked its citizens to help build a timeline of the web’s history. Given that reelyActive has existed on the Web for about a quarter of its history, we thought it’d be fun to look back at […]

What’s in store (pun intended) for 2019? The Local Search Association kicks off each year with a compilation of its members’ predictions. This is our third consecutive year submitting predictions. While our 2017 prediction proved way too optimistic, our 2018 prediction, and the two we submitted this year, resonate well among those of our peers. […]

Since the advent of the iBeacon five years ago, much effort has been spent on real-time location-based experiences through mobile. If today you were to ask “Should I develop a native mobile app?” to anyone who has invested in such efforts, you may well receive an emphatic NO. In this blog post, we’ll not […]

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, in Canada and in many nations around the world, a minute of silence is observed. Remembrance Day, as we call it here, is special this year as it marks the 100th anniversary of the signing of the armistice of the First World War, […]

This year marks a decade of the smartphone ecosystem as we know it. While the original iPhone debuted in 2007, it was the introduction of the App Store with the iPhone 3G in 2008 that kicked off the era of a rectangle in every pocket. Coincidentally, this month marks half a decade of Bluetooth Low […]